I spent Monday afternoon at the local fair, at which I ate pierogis and ice cream, watched a steam-powered corn-sheller, and saw many farm animals, including a selection of adorable and unusual chickens. Unless it's near Easter time, chickens get short shrift in the crafting world. But there's no need to save up your chicken-making ideas for March. I hereby give you permission to create a beautiful or funny or even fierce chicken, any time of the year. As always, I've listed these ten in order from roughly easiest/youngest kid level, to hardest/oldest kid (or teen, or adult) level. Your mileage may vary.

First off is a kindergarden-friendly craft from Kids Artists. I like that these hens get their own nesting boxes, and that their wings are made of the children's hand tracings. Super simple and cute.

The collages created by the HSES art class are amazing! The blog takes you through the multi-step process. I always appreciate a class project that allows students the freedom to make their project unique.

Speaking of class projects, this rooster is made entirely from the kids' traced hands. The multiple fingers give the bird a nice, feathery look. This photo is from a Russian art teacher's blog, and this post is titled "Teamwork".

I love an interactive piece of art. Powerful Mothering's mama hen keeps her chicks nestled underneath her when it's time to rest. Little kids can use this craft to work on counting skills. (How many chicks haven't come to bed yet because they are still hoping for another episode of Adventure Time?)

Today's round-up has a number of international, non-English-text blogs. It must mean that chicken admiration is a worldwide phenomenon. These paper plate chickies are from Creativity Attack, an Italian kids' craft blog. Translated, the directions are pretty open-ended, but this is another WYSIWYG craft (What You See is What You Get, meaning, it's a cinch to figure out how to make it just by looking at the photo).

I adore this chicken. At first it seemed to be an orphaned Pinterest images, but I tracked it down at Fem Manuals, a blog from Barcelona. I still haven't found a how-to, but using my observational skills, it appears this chicken is made with a balsa-wood body, a cardboard head and neck, paper and real feathers, and everything has been decorated further with pastels, markers, and paint.

This splendid pasta rooster was made by artist ﻿Noëlle Lavaivre﻿. The image is another mysterious internet find, but I think it came from A Book of Ideas from 1970. This craft is on my list for inspiration only; looking at some of the curves in those pasta pieces, I think she may have cooked them until they were pliable and then let them dry in the shapes she wanted. And that is a level of difficulty and nit-pickery I would not ask you to take on. However, I do endorse the art method of gluing pieces of pasta, beans, and other dried foodstuffs to heavy paper.

OK, back to a more traditional, and make-able, craft: This happy egg-carton chicken from Aux Petites Mains. The site is in French, but has handy how-to photos. You can also use Google Translate to read how it's made.

Oh my, these are some seriously odd and fluffy birds from the notebooks of Josephine (another French site). No how-to shots, but the simple directions (via Google Translate) make the process very clear.

And finally, we have these vibrantly-colored folk-art chickens from Krokotak, a site I adore. This project comes with a template, and involves cutting up a cereal box, taping it shut, adding various parts, then decoupaging the whole shebang, and finally adding more details with paper scraps and markers. So, it is last on my list, as it is clearly the most complex — but so unique and beautiful!